Senior Systems Test Engineer - Maritime Autonomy Validation

InvestedintheMission; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Dental and Vision Insurance

401(k) Retirement Plan

Stock Options

Time Off

Parental Leave

Competitive Salary

Free lunch benefit

Unlimited free drinks and snacks inthe

Life and Disability Insurance

Job summary

Saronic Technologies is a leader in revolutionizing autonomy at sea, seeking a software engineer to transform an extensive test capability set and HITL infrastructure into a unified verification platform. You will implement property-based testing, deterministic simulation, and fault-injection testing across the stack, collaborating with autonomy, perception, systems, and hardware teams.

You’ll run Rust unit tests, VM-based integration tests, and simulations against real hardware and fleet data,

Qualifications

• Senior: 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial time spent owning test infrastructure, V&V strategy, or reliability for a non-trivial production system.
• Staff: 8+ years of equivalent experience, including architecture and cross-functional leadership of a verification or platform reliability function.
• Strong programming skills in Rust and/or C++, plus comfort with Python for test orchestration, data analysis, and CI tooling.
• Hands-on experience building and operating one or more of: hardware-in-the-loop test rigs, fuzz harnesses, property-based test suites, deterministic-simulation frameworks, or large-scale simulation/replay pipelines.
• Track record of treating test infrastructure as a real codebase.
• Strong systems intuition: you can read an unfamiliar daemon, find the invariants it actually depends on, and write tests that fail before the bug is fixed.
• Excellent debugging and root-cause analysis skills, with a passion for both "firefighting" and "fire prevention".
• Comfort working in a fast-paced startup environment where the test strategy needs to be designed and shipped, not just discussed.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive the test initiatives for Saronic's system software, including the HITL test catalog and station orchestrator, HITL-VM bridge framework, NixOS-based VM integration test suite.
• Design and roll out a unified test strategy that combines our primary tools: Rust unit and property tests, VM-based integration tests, HITL-based tests, and replay/simulation based scenario tests into a single decision tree so that the right test type covers the right risk class at the right cost.
• Build out property-based and deterministic simulation testing across the software stack. Expand coverage to the libraries where invariants matter most (planners, trackers, schedulers, state machines, codecs, IPC framing, certificate/identity stacks) and introduce a shared invariant-testing pattern that other engineers can adopt.
• Stand up fuzz testing infrastructure from scratch. Identify high leverage surfaces, write the harnesses, get them running continuously, and triage or resolve findings.
• Expand the HITL test catalog. Drive coverage into areas currently underserved, expanding VM based integration tests to exercise real hardware paths.
• Treat HITL stations as a first class product. Partner to keep stations healthy, observable, and reproducible; harden the CI scheduler pipeline that owns reservations and execution across multiple physical stations; reduce flake; improve the test result dashboard and analytics that engineers rely on.
• Inject faults, not just inputs. Build out chaos and fault injection capabilities, process kills, network partitions, time skew, CAN bus jamming, sensor dropouts that complement our existing test types and that property tests and HITL tests can both consume.
• Build interfaces between our onboard test infrastructure and our cloud infrastructure test artifact storage, MCAP capture and replay, metrics collection and storage, fleet-data fetch, and the existing CI plumbing so that an engineer can author one test and run it locally, in CI, on a HITL station, or against historical fleet data with minimal friction.
• Work hands-on with engineers across the company to catch real bugs. Pair with feature owners on test plans during design reviews, write the hard tests yourself, and travel to test sites to see your tests in action on real boats when needed.
• Document everything. Maintain the test infrastructure architecture docs, runbooks so that other engineers can keep adding good tests without needing your hands on the keyboard.
• Design, develop, and maintain software systems, using NixOS, for autonomous navigation, control, and communication of surface vessels.
• Collaborate with hardware engineers to integrate software with vessel systems, ensuring seamless operation.
• Implement algorithms for controls and sensor fusion.
• Optimize network communications for low bandwidth/high latency environments.
• Conduct software testing and validation to ensure reliability and performance in real-world maritime environments.
• Participate in code reviews and maintain high coding standards, ensuring scalability and maintainability of software.
• Troubleshoot and debug complex software issues, providing timely resolutions.
• Document software designs, processes, and test results for compliance and knowledge sharing.
• Stay updated on industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in autonomous systems.

Skills

Rust

C++

Python

Tools

HITL rigs

Fuzz harnesses

Property-based testing

Deterministic simulation

NixOS tests

Nix flakes

CargoNix integration

CI tooling

Job description

Saronic Technologies is a leader in revolutionizing autonomy at sea, seeking a software engineer to transform an extensive test capability set and HITL infrastructure into a unified verification platform. You will implement property-based testing, deterministic simulation, and fault-injection testing across the stack, collaborating with autonomy, perception, systems, and hardware teams.

You’ll run Rust unit tests, VM-based integration tests, and simulations against real hardware and fleet data,